The New Patriotic Party (NPP) has advised former president John Dramani Mahama to stop lying to Ghanaians about his record while in power because “the facts show otherwise.”
Reacting to Mahama’s recent assertion that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is hiding behind COVID-19 to overspend, the General Secretary of the NPP, John Boadu said the 2020 flagbearer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) is out of touch with post-COVID-19 governance.
“Much as John Mahama seeks re-election on a campaign platform of ‘going back’ to the IMF, he attempts to confuse history by painting a rosy picture of his disastrous management of the Ghanaian economy between 2012 and 2016. Indeed, he put the economy in freefall after extremely reckless expenditure in excess of some GHS12 billion in pursuit of election victory in 2012.
“His economy, under Seth Terkper, never recovered, leading to unheard of taxation measures on condoms and cutlasses,” Boadu said.
He added: “This period of economic mismanagement was marked by rising inflation and downward growth, with growth declining steeply from 14% in 2011 to 3.9% in 2016. This steep decline was in normal ‘bust and boom’ times, according to John Mahama.
“The worst economic crisis former President Mahama ever faced was falling commodity prices, which according to his boom and bust analysis, is normal for every administration. Yet, he could not manage to keep the economy on an even keel.”
On COVID-19, Boadu said: “He just does not get it. All economic modelling worldwide is premised on COVID-19 and the ability to preserve lives and then livelihoods, as President Akufo-Addo succinctly puts it for the world to note and follow.
“Moreover, the Akufo-Addo administration has faced the worst ever international crisis in COVID-19, a scourge that has depreciated the worldwide economy and driven debt up generally. John Mahama’s lack of understanding of the Covid-19 economy is positively dangerous for Ghana because it badly skews his feeble attempts at analysis of our current economic situation. The IMF, to which he trumpets we should go to, has certified our economy as one of the fastest growing in terms of COVID-19 economic rebound.
“Mahama put together a COVID-19 advisory team. COVID-19 is not over yet. Where is the advisory team announced to applause and pageantry? Nowhere to be found. For the information of former President Mahama, COVID-19 is not only a matter of health. It has fundamentally become an economic imperative.”
Mr. Boadu also noted that Mahama would have messed up if he were the president at the time of COVID.
“In that light, what would Mahama have done differently? What and where are his alternatives? Alternative financial plan and alternative Covid-19 management plan? He has no plan because he does not realise and accept that Covid-19 has a fundamental impact on the economy.
“What is former President Mahama’s approach to securing vaccines? What is his alternative to keeping schools open, which he and his party criticised vehemently barely a year ago? What is the Mahama alternative to the measures in the cocoa sector that have yielded an all record cocoa bean output?
“Indeed, what is John Mahama’s alternative to anything, apart from the IMF? If you are the alternative, then spell out your alternatives to the Ghanaian people now. He is asking for a dialogue on the economy. There are many fora available for such a dialogue but he needs to put forward his plan.
“Anybody can and has the right to criticise. But we expect a man who has been Vice President, head of the NDC’s economic management team and subsequently President and insistently bidding to become President again, to offer tangible alternatives, capable of feasibility testing, instead of just criticising. What is your plan? What is your vision for growing Ghana?”
Furthermore, he said Mahama “actively oversaw the worst crisis ever to hit our financial sector, negligence that has cost over GHS21 billions of public resources to correct. Meanwhile, he turned judgement debt payments into a cottage industry.”
